Hello everyone it’s good to be back. It’s been a while since I’ve posted anything, real life gets in the way of everyone at some point and I decided to leave my return until something occurred that had to be written about, that needed to be shown and chronicled.

Now as you know A Day on Tumblr has so far been an examination of the groups on Tumblr, the Otherkin and the Furries and all the other crazies, and that will occur, we will still dissect the inmates of the asylum that is Tumblr to sate our sick curiosity, but we’re going to expand on that premise as I said in my last post. Instead of just limiting ourselves to these groups we will also be examining events, things that happen to or are caused by Tumblr, and we’re going to start with an extremely relevant topic that is actually still ongoing. Today we will be talking about the Great Independence Day Raids, the day when Tumblr punched a rabid dog in the snout and cried when it bit their hand off.

4chan, a brief overview

Everyone knows 4chan, or at least should have an idea of what it is. Launched in 2003 by Christopher Poole, the English language, anonymous imageboard is one of the most infamous places on the internet, and currently ranked 1,018 in the list of most popular sites globally, reaching 483 in the United States. As many know 4chan isn’t the friendliest place, it has its own culture, its own standards, and no taboos, so you can understand why some people would have a problem with it.

Shut down 4chan

Enter Tumblr, the antithesis of 4chan. Where 4chan revels in the racist, the sexist, the insane, Tumblr is a field of golden hugboxes stretching as far as the eye can see, a place where anyone who is different, even if those differences are completely made up, can find people to validate them. They are the internet equivalent of the mongoose and the snake.

On June 9 2014 this post was made on a tumblr called ‘shutdown4chan.tumblr.com’.

As you can see they planned to ‘go to their site as a form of protest we will overwhelm them with corrections to their awful lies and let them really know what the world thinks of them’. How? Well through ‘comics, stories, poetry, essays or pictures’. Here is a better shot of the image posted.

The posts continue, with this one from June 11.

Finally we have this quote from the same day;

“I want to reassure all of our supporters that it’s highly unlikely 4chan will target you in particular the honest truth is, they’re largely impotent losers…”

Those poor tumblrettes had no idea what was in store for them.

This is where this recent trouble begins, Tumblr decides to go in and ‘educate those racist shitlords’ and crusade against the injustice 4chan represents. Now something similar to this has happened before back in 2010.

Operation Overlord

Operation Overlord (yes they named if after the codename for the Battle of Normandy) was a shitflinging contest between /b/ (the random imageboard of 4chan) and Tumblr, after some users on /b/ grew tired of Tumblr constantly ‘stealing their memes’. On November 12th 2010 these users flooded Tumblr using fake accounts with gore, porn, child porn and general trolling. This lead to retaliation from Tumblr who flooded 4chan with pictures of kittens, forgetting the fact that kittens are in fact adorable.

On November 14th /b/ planned to DDoS (Distribute Denial of Service attack, essentially shut down the website). When this failed (due to a distinct lack of interest) Tumblr retaliated, leading to the mods of 4chan implementing a word filter that 404’d every thread with the word ‘Tumblr’ in it. /b/ became an empty wasteland. Operation Overlord took a surprise turn however when one anon made a startling discovery;

In the end 4chan and Tumblr put aside their differences to fuck each other’s brains out, which also lead to a series of fanart and photoshops depicting /b/ as a bitter husband and Tumblr as a cute hipster wife.

Yes, love really did end a war for once. But angry makeup sex could only work for so long and tensions began to rise again, particularly in concern to /pol/.

/pol/- Politically Incorrect

Once upon a time there was a board known as /new/, the news board of 4chan. But then one day it vanished, never to be seen again.

Theories naturally burst forth, ranging from incompatibility with 4chan’s modernization to concerns of how hard it was to moderate. Refusing to let this be the end, a group of /n/ewsmen wandered the other boards, setting up new /new/ wherever they could. In 2011, under pressure from users, M00t remade /new/ in the form of /pol/, a place where former /n/ users could congregate, discuss and debate current events issues and politics

/pol/ rapidly became known as the centre of racism, anti-Semitism, sexism and anti-liberal feelings, and they weren’t afraid to make their voices heard. One of their most infamous projects involves the anti-government cartoonist Ben Garrison, where they would edit his cartoons to promote anti-Semitic messages. They were done so well that many began to believe the edits were the real Garrison cartoons, the point where one of the suggested searches on google when you type his name is ‘Ben Garrison anti-Semite’.

The Ben Garrison problem has become so well known that the Online Hate Prevention Institute, a charity created in 2012 by Dr Andre Oboler, took an interest. On May 22 2014 the OHPI posted a briefing on its website about /pol/, which ended with this;

“Those like Dean need to be held accountable and 4chan and /pol/ in particular, need to look after their own shop. An online space with a little more freedom is a good thing, but it’s up to the community itself to warn people like Dean off when they go too far.”

But as usual, /pol/ didn’t give a damn.

/pol/ doesn’t just stop with Jews though, they also despise feminists and SJW’s, to the point that they make satirical and extreme twitter hashtags (/pol/ having noticed that the twitter hashtag is the go to tool for these types of people). The most hilarious part of this however is that legitimate SJW’s and tumblrettes latch onto these fake hashtags, attacking and defending them as if they were real. One of the most recent hashtags that /pol/ had a hand in was the #whitescantberaped tag in June 2014.

#whitescantberaped took the logic of the social justice warrior to its logical conclusion, stating that since racism=prejudice+ power (and thus whites cannot be a victim of racism) then that must mean that whites cannot be raped either, since rape=prejudice+power. The fact that this hashtag took off to the extent that it did does not surprise me at all. Naturally when the truth was revealed that this hashtag was in fact a prank, the people who had before defended it and supported it jumped ship, trying to pin all the blame on /pol/, but it was too late and at its peak the hashtag had over 1000 tweets.

/pol/ isn’t afraid to kick people where it hurts, and this is just some of their activities, you can see why Tumblr would utterly despise them and the imageboard that gave birth to them.

The raids begin

July 4th, the big day for these brave crusaders of peace, love and tolerance. Like a tide of respect and peace these warriors stormed the battlements of the evil, intolerant 4chan, determined to show these uneducated shitlords they were not afraid and would not bow down anymore. Focusing on /b/ and /pol/ the armies of Tumblr stormed the castle with their poetry and comics celebrating diversity and acceptance.

They were then promptly kicked out.

Really it was only a handful of threads, a pathetic excuse for a raid really, but it was enough for 4chan to march to war. /b/ and /pol/ weren’t going to take this lying down oh no, they retaliated, and they retaliated the only way that 4chan knows how to. They found what they loved and killed it in the most gruesome way possible.

4chan retaliates

4chan knows their enemy, they knew that the ones that had tried to raid them were tumblrettes, and the best way to destroy tumblr users is to hit them right in their heart, in the fandoms. 4chan users created hundreds and hundreds of fake Tumblr accounts, went to the feminism, Sherlock, attack on titan, doctor who and other fandom tags, and posted a flood of gore, porn and rape images and gifs, the type of stuff that can disgust a normal person and utterly destroy the type of fragile special snowflakes that fill Tumblr. The reactions of course were hilarious.

This post by xmckenzie177 is a simple 5 sentence post with the ‘#safety’ ‘#help’ and ‘#selfharm’ tags, the actions of 4chan apparently ‘triggering’ her so badly she feels the need to cut herself.

We also have this one; supplied by /b/ that I think showcases the two different views of 4chan and Tumblr. As you can see Anmerkungen posted ‘IF THAT’S A REAL GUN DO NNOT KILL YOURSELF. YOUR FRIENDS ARE SAFE THE REST OF TUMBLR IS TRYING TO CLEAN OUT THE TAGS’, all in capitals with the tags ‘#4chan’, ‘#SIGNAL BOOST’ , ‘#MARVEL’ and what I can only assume is ‘#avengers’ judging from the marvel tag. Just above it you can see the top half of a post on the /b/ thread ‘Squirt gun. Fake as shit OP is a faggot’.

/pol/ and /b/ created some collages for observers like us to enjoy, here’s my personal favorite, its nice and easy to read compared to some of the others but they all follow the same general format.

This is just the tip of the tear-stained iceberg.

Tumblr users aren’t just stopping with self-harm though, they also made a petition to try and have the actions of 4chan ‘recognized as internet crimes’.

As you can see the petition, started by Charlie Nelson, has some reasonable support, with 259 supporters and only 240 more needed. What Charlie likely didn’t expect however, was /b/ getting wind of the petition and deciding to help him out a bit.

Page after page of these obviously fake supporters, ranging from Hitler to Stalin to Putin, one supporter even posted the book of Genesis in their ‘reasons for signing’ section.

Finally a ‘Tumblr fangirl’ named Hendra decided that enough was enough, that the only way to stop 4chan was to appeal to a higher authority, namely m00t, the creator of 4chan. At 6:30pm on July 4th she sent an email to m00t asking him to take ‘immediate action’ against the raiders.

M00t won’t be getting that email for a while however, why? Because he’s on vacation without a laptop.

Conclusion

Now I have no idea how this is going to end, but I can hazard a guess. 4chan will get bored and move on, Tumblr will grow more hate filled and life will move on. But I think this event is an important one because it shows that Tumblr has the self preservation instincts of a lemming. Let this go out as a warning, do not fuck with these people unless you want to see things that will haunt you forever.